March 11, 1998

Strange but True Tales From the Annals of Drinking Laws

By FRANK J. PRIAL

n Chicago, it's now OK to feed wine to a dog. Or so one must
assume, as a city law that banned serving Champagne to Skippy has
been repealed. There is no way of telling how the dogs feel about
this, but among connoisseurs of ludicrous wine legislation, the dog
law will be missed.

Not that there is any shortage of laws designed to inconvenience
wine drinkers. Around the country, hundreds of state and local
laws, ghosts of Prohibition, make buying and selling wine, spirits
and beer far more complicated than it should be.

For example, New York state bans the sale of wine in grocery
stores, to keep it out of the hands of minors. Or so we are told.

Yet, beer is sold in grocery stores, in full view of
impressionable youngsters -- and only in grocery stores. Every day,
hundreds of out-of-state visitors are surprised to hear clerks in
New York liquor stores say, "We're not allowed to sell beer."

New York is one of 15 states that ban the sale of wine in
grocery stores outright. In Minnesota, however, only grocers in the
three largest cities sell wine; Rhode Island puts limits on wine
sales in towns with 10,000 or fewer residents, plus Newport.

Once credit cards were banned in liquor stores and wine shops,
but now Arkansas is the only state where they are not allowed. In
New York, you can use a credit card to buy wine, but only if you
show up at the store in person. In Alabama, it's illegal to buy any
alcoholic beverages by telephone, fax or e-mail.

Let's say you are a wine connoisseur and you've decided to sell
your collection of rare wines to another collector. Don't even try
it in New York, or in most other states. Wine must be sold through
a licensed retailer. Naturally, there is a busy and lucrative trade
in illicit wine sales.

It's the same with wine auctions in New York. They were banned
for years until an arrangement was made that puts the retailers in
charge. Any wine purchased at an auction in New York must be
cleared through a licensed retailer, who adds his fee to the cost.

In states where wine prices are regulated, a retailer can't give
away even a cheap corkscrew. Such premiums are seen as a reduction
in the price of the wine, though in fact the consumer pays the full
amount. On the same principle, Arkansas bans that old saloon
standby, the free lunch. Should a Little Rock barkeep so much as
offer a customer a ham sandwich, he risks a $100 fine and 30 days
in the county jail.

In Utah, a restaurateur takes similar chances in offering a
customer a wine list. If the patron asks for the list, no problem,
but offering it unbidden is looking for trouble with the law. So is
serving a second glass of wine to someone who hasn't finished the
first.

Most of these outlandish or silly rules date from just after
Prohibition's repeal, when they were meant as concessions to the
prohibitionists, who were still active at the time. Originally,
these laws dealt with the moral aspects of drinking: banning sales
of it on Sundays, for example, and seeing that taverns were not
established anywhere near a church.

In recent years, laws against wine and liquor have taken on a
more protectionist role. The controversy over direct shipments from
California wineries to consumers around the country is a case in
point. Direct shipment of wine into New York state is banned,
ostensibly because minors might buy it, using phony identification
and a parent's credit card.

In fact, this issue has little to do with concern for minors and
much to do with the state's well-organized wine and liquor
distributors, the industry's middlemen, who lose income on every
direct sale. Pressed by distributors, several states have made
direct shipment a felony.

The Wine Institute, which represents most of the California
wineries, works to abolish anti-wine laws and to head off new ones.

"They range from the unnecessary to the absurd, but they
effectively rob the American consumer of economic rights and
freedom of choice regarding wine," said John DeLuca, president of
the institute.

Not surprisingly, the institute is not reluctant to point out
some of the laws its sees as most restrictive. Like the Colorado
law requiring wine to be sold in containers no smaller than 24
ounces and spirits in containers no smaller than a fifth of a
gallon. What this does is prevent the average drinking man from
slipping a pint of his favorite into his jacket or back pocket. It
also means that splits of Champagne and half-bottles of wine are
illegal.

At the same time, Colorado decrees that nothing can be stored in
hotel mini-bars but miniatures; no cans of beer, no half-bottles of
wine. Half the law says "nothing too small," and half says
"nothing too large."

In Florida, wine can't be sold in a container larger than a
gallon. In Kentucky, where some counties are dry and some are not,
it's illegal to take alcoholic beverages into a dry county but OK
to take them out, so long as they are in containers no smaller than
three gallons. Presumably, this is for whisky distillers who happen
to be based in dry counties.

Probably the most egregious government encroachment on America's
drinking habits is the controlled state. In 18 states, plus
Montgomery County, Md., sales of wine and spirits are controlled by
a state-run monopoly. The largest of these states is Pennsylvania.
Over the years Pennsylvania governors have sworn to rid the state
of this uncompetitive relic. None have been able to overcome the
unions of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's employees.

Pennsylvania wine drinkers vote with their feet or, more
accurately, with their cars. Liquor store owners in neighboring
states estimate that more than one-third of their fine-wine
customers come from Pennsylvania.

Mark Squires, who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia
and puts out a wine magazine on the World Wide Web, estimates that
wine enthusiasts in Pennsylvania probably buy only 20-30 percent of
their wine in the state. The other 70-80 percent they buy across
the Delaware River in New Jersey, where selections are greater,
clerks more knowledgeable and prices 10-15 percent lower.

One thriving Camden, N.J., retailer said of the Pennsylvania
liquor bureaucrats, "I bless them every day."